Dickens and his Christmas Collaborators: Brand Authorship, Apprenticeship and Career Development

This thesis aims at scrutinizing the strategic arrangement of publishing relatively unknown authors under a highly marketable name - here, that of ‘Dickens’ - and its modus operandi, and to inquire into the effects of this practice of the publishing industry: on the contributors themselves, on the brand, and on the sellers and buyers of literature. The commercialization of literature in the nineteenth century, which turned readers into consumers and books into merchandise, enabled professional authorship to operate as a marketable ‘brand’ identity. This study will examine the conduct of readers, publishers and the literary market as a collective unit, in the context of their perception of a brand- identity. The thesis explores Charles Dickens’ collaboration with other writers in the production of his periodicals Household Words (1850-1859) and All the Year Round (1859- 1895), with particular focus on the collective authorship of the ‘extra Christmas numbers’. Despite the presence of multiple authors behind such collaborative ventures, the name under which these works were identified, projected and marketed in the realm of literary commerce, was that of the celebrated ‘Mr. Dickens’.
The central objective of this project is to analyse the significance and functioning of the practice of brand authorship in Dickens’ multi-authored Christmas stories of the 1850s and 1860s, whereby - unnoticed, and often unrecognised, names engaged in professional collaboration with a celebrated author. One of the main questions that will be pursued here is whether this journalistic strategy was useful and advantageous for Dickens’ collaborators; did it enhance their career prospects, and could it be viewed as an effective career strategy for emerging writers? Or was collaboration with Dickens obstructive for their independent reputation-building and for cultivating their own distinctive identity? To respond to these inquiries, cases of a few selected authors have been examined which include Edmund Yates, George Augustus Sala, Amelia Blandford Edwards, Charles Collins and Eliza Lynn Linton.